BBC iPlayer Performance Pack - March 2013

The BBC iPlayer performance pack for March 2013 is now available as a PDF to download.

Monthly summary headlines – March 2013

• 272 million BBC iPlayer requests in March, equalling the record breaking figures from January this year

• For the first time ever, there were more requests on tablet devices than mobile devices (200,000 requests ahead of mobiles) driven primarily by TV viewing. Both mobile and tablet usage remained high – making up 30% of overall requests – or 81 million requests in total

• Radio listening grew month-on-month to a record breaking 72 million requests (up +7%), 83% of which was live listening on par with February’s figures. The proportion of live TV viewing also remained stable at 12%

• New star-studded Radio 4 sci-fi drama, Neil Gaiman - Neverwhere, was the most popular radio programme – in a change from popular Radio 4 comedies topping the radio list

• The Top Gear: Africa Special proved very popular, with a huge 5.7 million requests across parts 1 and 2. One-off specials such as Comic Relief 2013 Funny for Money and Our Girl also did well, as did the new series of The Voice UK

• Average daily requests remained high with an average of 8.1 million. Weekly requests also continued to be strong, peaking at 60 million in the second week of the month. The last week in March saw a small dip compared to recent weeks most likely caused by the Easter holiday; and the long weekend affected radio requests more than TV

Consistent with previous months:

• The profile of BBC iPlayer users has evened out over time in terms of male/female ratio, but remains strongly under-55 in terms of age, which is younger than the typical TV viewer or radio listener’s profile (although more in line with home broadband users)

• BBC iPlayer is used for TV at roughly the same time of day as linear TV viewing, although there is proportionally more daytime and late-peak use. For radio, BBC iPlayer is used far more in daytime than traditional radio listening, which peaks at breakfast-time

• The problem with measurement which has now been fixed was for the pop-out console for radio listening on computers – so a large increase in the number of requests via computers was seen overall in January as a result of this problem being resolved. This problem is believed to have affected previous Radio numbers for the past 18 months.